There are two conflicting cultural memories and two alternative memorial cultures that coexist in contemporary Latvia —one is glorifying the Soviet army’s victory over the Nazis in 1945, the other is commemorating victims of communism and Stalin’s terror. The aim of this paper is to analyse how the narratives of architectural heritage can be used for current political needs and demands, by looking closely at the case of the Victory Memorial to the Soviet Army in Riga. The monument was dedicated in 1985, during the Soviet occupation of Latvia. It symbolises the liberation of Latvia from Nazi Germany and therefore, Soviet soldiers were called ‘liberators’, despite the well-known fact that the Soviet regime was responsible for mass deportations to Siberia and countless killings of civilians in Latvia. From the autumn of 2017 to the present, almost 12,000 people signed a petition for the dismantling of the monument. Ultimately, the paper aims to explore how the meaning of heritage is constructed and interpreted in a particular geographical, cultural, social and political context. In this paper, the semiotic approach is employed to determine the semantics and pragmatics of the Victory Memorial, while cultural memory theory is applied to determine how ‘selective’ use of the historical narratives of the past are used by stakeholders as a powerful vehicle to validate and reproduce certain social and cultural meanings.
